Locating Filth: Sin, Syphilis and the Path to Purity

Abstract

This chapter explores how the Basel Mission doctors tried to spread new knowledge of hygiene in their West African mission areas by combining religious notions of purity with scientific approaches to health and colonial concepts of cleanliness. The longstanding Pietist interpretation of disease as a distorted relationship with God still held true for the Basel medical missionaries, who frequently explained physical suffering with reference to a sinful way of life. The diagnosis of syphilis, in particular, unequivocally linked disease to sin, and proved to be an effective advertising tool to promote the necessity and benefit of the medical mission beyond evangelical circles. Although there were clear indications that the prevalent condition was not syphilis, the diagnosis prevailed for twenty-five years until the young Basel Mission doctor Theodor Müller identified the illness in 1910 as yaws, which was not in fact a venereal disease like syphilis.

Hygiene became a key issue in the advancement of the civilising mission in the late nineteenth century as ideas of a healthy body and cultural progress fused with each other. New meanings of hygiene were negotiated on the alleged margins of colonial society, where norms were called into question and boundaries constantly transgressed. The rationale behind the civilising mission implied that the Basel medical missionaries were operating on the frontier of civilisation, where people still lived in sin, dirt and disease. Hygiene appeared as the new colonial crusade, bringing together religious, scientific and political stakeholders and their interests, which allowed the Basel Mission doctors to reinforce the significance of their mission. The core objective of their hygiene mission in West Africa, however, was to raise awareness for the individual’s inherent sinfulness by promoting a Pietist path to purity.

1 On a Hygiene Mission in West Africa

Regarding the prospects of a medical mission, the members of the Committee recorded in 1880 that “combining bodily and spiritual healing” constituted “a valid thought” since “sin and disease (death) are closely linked.”¹ Hermann Prätorius, the Basel Mission’s Inspector for Africa, who accompanied Mähly on his medical research expedition in 1882–1883, confirmed that “the physical misery, the disease misery” prevalent in Africa was “sadly, in many cases” associated with the “misery of sin” in an article printed in the monthly magazine Der Evangelische Heidenbote. He concluded that “in the heathen land it becomes terribly clear that sin is the cause of human decay.”² Twelve years later, the Basel Mission doctor Alfred Eckhardt maintained that “on the Gold Coast, it is particularly obvious that sin frequently and directly results in disease.”³

The longstanding Pietist interpretation of disease as a distorted relationship with God still held true for the Basel Mission doctors, who frequently explained physical suffering with reference to a sinful way of life. The first issue of the Basel Mission’s medical magazine in 1891 reported: “Our doctors are under the impression of the horrible bodily misery of the heathens every day, which is a true reflection of the reign of sin and estrangement from God among these people.”⁴ Although they identified pathogens under the microscope, the Basel Mission doctors believed that physical processes were closely intertwined with spiritual causes. In their view, body and mind were united through the soul, at the centre of which stood the heart.⁵ To keep one’s body and mind clean and healthy, therefore, was not an end in itself but a prerequisite for the evolution of the soul and the purification of the heart.

For the Basel Mission doctors, healing always had an incorporeal connotation and complete cure could only be achieved through spiritual cleansing and adopting a Christian way of life. They were not interested in a purely physical healing process, since medical treatments such as surgery or drugs did not address what they considered to be the true cause of disease: sin. The essential sinfulness of traditional African society was therefore stressed and the connection between sin and disease was a central feature of medical missionary ideology. In a report from 1891, Fisch—upset about the low numbers of conversions in Aburi at the time—highlighted this point:

All the help for the body alone is merely a drop in the sea of heathen misery. Only when a great, true community of the Lord takes root here, can misery be controlled. If a significant share of the people is not converting, then not even 10,000 mission doctors can save the people from doom.⁶

The Basel Mission doctors interpreted discomfort, pain and disease as means through which God communicated his will to individual people. They considered illness to be a time of reflection, a chance for critical self-examination of one’s way of life and faith, and, ultimately, an opportunity to purify one’s heart and (re-)connect with God.⁷ This aspect was stressed in efforts to gain financial and ideological support from evangelicals back home. In the specialised journal An die Freunde des Ärtzlichen Zweiges der Basler Mission, Inspector Theodor Oehler described to potential supporters and benefactors that:

[…] in the heathen world, the connection between disease and sin comes to light with frightening clarity. In thousands of cases, the physical disease is the sharp rod in God’s hands to reawaken a long muted conscience and to make a sinner aware of the impending retaliation.⁸

To promote this connection between disease and sin, the Basel Mission doctors operated as “itinerant preachers with subsequent medical advice.”⁹ Using their bicycles to reach surrounding villages and more remote areas in West Africa, they travelled from station to station to hold consultation hours and offer their guidance. Rudolf Fisch was the first to introduce the bicycle to the Gold Coast in 1892, thereby challenging the longstanding practice of Europeans being carried in hammocks by African porters. Fisch’s fellow missionaries were at first appalled that he had broken this established taboo. They believed that journeys on foot or on a bike had to be avoided at all costs in order not to overexert and endanger one’s health. In their view, Fisch was acting against tested and proven principles of tropical hygiene that he himself had advocated for many years.¹⁰

The Basel missionaries’ initial reluctance in replacing the hammock with the bicycle demonstrates how strongly hygiene norms dominated their daily lives in West Africa. Over the years, however, the bicycle became an inherent part of the Basel Mission on the Gold Coast, as the picture of the missionaries leaving the General Conference in Aburi in 1900 illustrates (Fig. 5.1).¹¹ The hammock had never been a particularly popular mode of travel among the Basel missionaries, who regularly complained about how difficult it was to find reliable and affordable porters, but it continued to be seen as the most hygienic means of transport in West Africa, especially for women.¹²

Fig. 5.1

Rudolf Fisch, The Missionaries leaving the General Conference, 1893/1906, BMA, D-30.09.023

The bicycle allowed the Basel Mission doctors to increase the scope of their work far beyond hospital walls. On their extended tours, they not only preached the gospel but also gave lectures on modes of infection, prophylactic measures and methods of treatment.¹³ By promoting a preventive programme for both spiritual and physical health, their medical mission comprised more than basic first aid and curative care. In 1902, Fisch started writing circular letters in African languages to promote what he thought were the “most fundamental rules of hygiene.”¹⁴ These guidelines, including recommendations on childbirth and the treatment of wounds, were sent to all the rulers in the areas in which the Basel Mission had established stations.¹⁵ The Basel Mission doctors believed that new values and behaviours of hygiene would make people in West Africa more aware of the close connection between sin and disease.

Over the years, the Basel Mission doctors not only complemented their circulars to regional authorities with information on the most common diseases and ways to treat them but also translated general textbooks on health and hygiene into African languages.¹⁶ Their efforts were increasingly valued by colonial doctors, politicians and a general public interested in the economic and cultural development of the colonies. In Germany, a growing circle of colonial enthusiasts, who were not necessarily supporters of mission societies due to their oftentimes differing agendas, acknowledged that missionaries had a crucial role to play in the civilising mission. By embedding ideas of cleanliness and health, the mission doctors’ work promised to contribute significantly to a flourishing colonial society.¹⁷

Ludwig Külz, who served as a government doctor in Cameroon and Togo between 1902 and 1912, wrote in hindsight:

The German colonial physicians noticed everywhere that the indigenous people who had been influenced by missionaries stepped out of hygienic passivity very soon, that baptised mothers brought their sick children to the physician far more than the others, that the value of the child increased and its active care was noticeable.¹⁸

Külz, who was generally very critical of the missionary movement, conceded in this article, printed in Anthropos in 1919–1920, that missionaries had been the driving forces behind the spread of hygienic norms and practices in the colonies. In a time when scientific medicine and the colonial state increasingly appeared as empirical and secular enterprises, the Basel Mission doctors appealed to medical scientists and colonial stakeholders by promising to locate and root out allegedly indecent body practices and irrational beliefs. The medical missionaries used manifold networks and media to depict immorality and disease among the people they wished to convert, thereby emphasising the need for their work to both their supporters at home and a wider audience beyond evangelical circles.

In 1889, Theodor Christlieb published a study on medical missions, in which he expounded: “Medical attendance best illustrates to half-civilised and barbaric people alike that Christian science is superior to heathen ignorance and that Christian love and philanthropy are superior to heathen selfishness and ferocity.”¹⁹ By putting scientific medicine and hygienic knowledge to the service of evangelisation, the Basel Mission doctors hoped to demonstrate that their belief and health system was superior both conceptually and morally to West African cosmologies of faith and healing. Medicine and hygiene were believed to assume what Walter Bruchhausen has called a “pacemaker function” by leveraging colonial expansion and the civilising mission.²⁰

Public approval of the hygiene mission in West Africa emboldened the Basel Mission to underline the role of hygiene as an uncontroversial yet potent component in the making of civilised communities. In contrast to the abstract and internal process of conversion, hygiene offered clear evidence of transformation, visible on individual bodies. As Jean and John Comaroff have shown for missionary rhetoric in nineteenth-century South Africa, “the blighted body served as a graphic symptom of moral disorder.”²¹ Hygiene with its alleged capacity not only to prevent disease but also remove moral disorder came to epitomise civilisational progress. Africa appeared indecent rather than merely unwashed, since ideas of hygiene were rooted in religious conceptions of purity and always entailed social and moral implications.

Beyond and beneath its promotional value, however, the hygiene discourse also reveals that missionaries, and Europeans more generally, were desperately looking for ways to make sense of the perceived chaos around them. The foods, smells and bodily practices that Europeans encountered and commented upon in many sources from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries indicate that hygiene appeared as a way to order the unfamiliarity of their African environment. Detailed rules of order and cleanliness purported that they were in control of colonial subjects and places. The preaching of hygiene attenuated their feelings of insecurity by establishing seemingly clear boundaries of purity and thus lent ideological support to Europeans in the colonial world.

2 The Insistence on Syphilis

The diagnosis of syphilis offered clear evidence for the pressing need and concrete benefit of the Basel medical mission in West Africa. As early as 1882, Mähly had assessed that a significant number of Africans suffered from venereal diseases, primarily syphilis. Syphilis continued to present a prevalent diagnosis in health reports from the Gold Coast with the arrival of the Basel medical missionaries from 1885. Fisch’s annual reports continually stated that 70 to 80 per cent of his patients suffered from what he called “Lustseuche”—desire epidemic—referring to syphilis.²² His yearly statistical surveys implied that the venereal disease was a permanent feature of the people on the Gold Coast: “This is the unspeakably miserable moral state of these poor people, expressed in numbers.”²³

In the Basel Mission’s diverse media, syphilis represented the epitome of heathen immorality and uncontrolled sexuality in West Africa. The epidemic proportions of syphilis called for urgent action. Healing of the body alone, however, did not promise improvement, particularly in the case of sexually transmitted diseases, as long as their apparent cause—the sexually promiscuous behaviour of Africans—had not been eliminated. Africans thus had to be educated about the true cause of the disease: their sinful way of life that triggered the condition.²⁴ In a speech at the annual Basel Mission Festival on 3 July 1895, Rudolf Fisch deployed the threat of syphilis to remind his audience of the desolate moral and sanitary conditions on the Gold Coast:

Physicians are used to see all sorts of terrible diseases but it is not without shuddering that we see these walking revelations of God’s wrath upon all the sins of mankind, these awfully disfigured faces, these bodies diffusing the smell of death covered with terrible wounds, these people stricken with syphilis, who waste away for years.²⁵

Syphilitic Africans embodied the apparent sinfulness of African societies and the imperative need for the medical mission, which paid attention to both the body and the soul. The condition called fwempow in the Twi language—meaning “big nose”—caused salient changes in physical appearance and thus proved particularly suited to advertise the medical mission.²⁶ The Basel Mission doctors disseminated photographs of afflicted Africans in their handbooks and articles, showing the typical features of the disease: the Gundu—a thickening and broadening of the nose—as well as the distortion of the forearms and lower legs.²⁷ Since colonial discourse on African people was fundamentally fixated on their bodies, these images aroused interest beyond the medical community.

The campaign to combat syphilis became a key indicator of the progress of the Basel Mission as a whole. The missionaries, who advocated Christian monogamy and heavily condemned polygamy as well as extramarital and premarital sexual relations, felt vindicated in their struggle by the supposed enormous occurrence of a sexually transmitted disease. They went out of their way to encourage West Africans to embrace their marriage and family model as the basis for sexual, social and economic order. As many studies have demonstrated, the colonial discourse on African people was thoroughly sexualised and the implementation of monogamous patriarchal matrimony was one of the core concerns of the civilising mission.²⁸ Most cases of deviant behaviour, as recorded in the Basel Mission’s parish council protocols, were concerned with the infringement of Christian sexual morals.²⁹

In contrast to most missionaries, who saw African sexuality as inherently uncontrolled and excessive, some European observers believed that it was the social and economic changes of colonialism that had spoiled the supposedly primitive and reassuringly innocent sexuality of pre-colonial Africans.³⁰ British officials on the Gold Coast, for instance, argued that the weakening of chiefly male control and the abolition of previously severe punishments for sexual offences had facilitated both the emancipation of women and the syphilis epidemic. Despite their differing perceptions of African sexuality, British administrators advocated for the extension of Christian morality as the only solution for re-establishing social and moral order.³¹ African authorities also participated in the discourse on how to combat syphilis, using it as an argument to extend their influence and tighten their control over their communities, particularly their female subjects.³²

It was certainly no coincidence that most photographs of patients suffering from syphilis in the Basel Mission doctors’ publications depicted women. It was female rather than male sexuality that was taken to be the problem.³³ Uncontrolled female sexuality was seen to bring sterility, depopulation and eventually what scientists of the time called “degeneration.” Fisch was convinced that the syphilis epidemic would result in the extinction of whole villages, inevitably leading to the doom of African societies: “It is a wonder to me that these poor people still exist, yes even proliferate, at least in certain places. However, there are a number of villages, in my opinion, that will perish of this disease soon.”³⁴ Although mortality rates did not support his apprehension, Fisch maintained that syphilis was both the cause and consequence of degeneration.³⁵

In 1910, Theodor Müller, a young mission doctor who had joined Fisch in Aburi a year earlier, openly questioned his colleagues’ diagnosis: “Experienced tropical doctors report that over 50 per cent of their patients suffer from syphilis. In reality, I only very rarely catch sight of fresh syphilis.”³⁶ He observed that the symptoms of the disease under scrutiny often differed from those of syphilis: the progressive paralysis of the nervous system occurring in syphilitic patients in Europe did not occur on the Gold Coast.³⁷ He suggested instead that the ailment that his predecessors had identified as syphilis for over 25 years was in effect yaws—a non-venereal, infectious skin disease.³⁸ Müller’s assertion was nothing short of revolutionary as it not only contradicted a well-established diagnosis but also unsettled the theoretical foundation of the medical mission, since the widespread disease could no longer be attributed to sinful behaviour.³⁹

So why then had the Basel medical missionaries failed to acknowledge that the disease they lamented for so many years was actually yaws and not syphilis? From a scientific perspective, although the disease agents could be identified microscopically from 1905, it was still not possible to distinguish the pathogens of yaws and syphilis under the microscope.⁴⁰ The scientific difficulty in telling apart syphilis from yaws also led famous tropical doctors, such as Heinrich Botho Scheube and Carl Mense, to be under the mistaken belief that African societies suffered from a syphilis epidemic around 1900.⁴¹ Moreover, the tenacity of this medical myth was certainly aided by the fact that the drugs used to treat syphilis also proved effective in dealing with yaws.⁴² Fisch reported in 1891 that his treatment of syphilis was popular among the people on the Gold Coast:

When a few syphilitics come from one place, I am certain that many more patients will visit me from there in the near future. Why this is the case is of course easy to see. With iodine or mercury preparations, even very serious cases of syphilis can easily be transferred to a latent illness.⁴³

In contrast to many other conditions, the Basel Mission doctors appeared fairly successful in treating what they thought was syphilis with medical preparations, wound care and occasionally also surgery. In 1905, the medical missionary Hermann Vortisch described syphilitic patients as “the best promotion for the medical mission.”⁴⁴ The diagnosis and successful treatment of syphilis offered a valuable promotional tool for the Basel Mission on the Gold Coast over many years, providing visible evidence for the validity of their medical procedures.

On a cultural level, the longstanding assumption that Africans were sexually hyperactive certainly obscured the identification of a non-venereal disease.⁴⁵ The diagnosis of syphilis confirmed what the Basel Mission doctors expected to find in West Africa all along. Missionaries, colonial authorities and scientists paid obsessive attention to the sexuality of Africans.⁴⁶ Their preoccupation with sexual practices, family constellations and initiation rites mirrored developments in Europe, where the sexuality of the working classes, and of women in particular, was a major concern. Syphilis was already a dreaded disease in Europe for centuries before city missionaries started associating the condition with the lower social strata and their promiscuous behaviour in the nineteenth century.⁴⁷

From a Pietist point of view, uncontrolled sexual desire entailed punishment through disease. This belief, derived from an Old Testament statement “that by what things a man sins, by these he is punished,” got in the way of a swift revision of the diagnosis of syphilis.⁴⁸ As late as 1909, Fisch stated in his annual report that the high occurrence of syphilis on the Gold Coast was “God’s punishment for sinful acts.”⁴⁹ This controversial interpretation, however, increasingly lost ground and became untenable in light of new scientific evidence and growing public criticism. The German dermatologist and psychiatrist Iwan Bloch, for instance, sharply condemned the Christian syphilis theory in his 1901 publication Der Ursprung der Syphilis.⁵⁰ In the fourth edition of Tropische Krankheiten in 1912, Fisch, who had returned to Basel that same year for retirement, finally revised his diagnosis, changing the chapter on syphilis into a chapter on yaws.⁵¹

Another factor that supported the misdiagnosis of syphilis was the nature of missionary discourse, in which sexually transmitted diseases were rarely explicitly named. Fisch’s early reports from the Gold Coast do not address syphilis directly. He merely alludes to the condition in brief and convoluted sentences describing his surroundings as a place “where the flesh reigns”⁵² or reporting on the “successful treatment of a certain disease very widely spread here like at home.”⁵³ This type of account was characteristic for missionary publications, which often did not label venereal diseases by name but merely alluded to them as their ravages came to represent the fundamental evils against which the missionaries were battling. The puritan taboo surrounding sexuality initially impeded the Basel Mission doctors in taking a closer look at the condition in front of them.

Finally, the Basel medical missionaries accepted the diagnosis of syphilis so willingly because they constantly felt pressured to justify themselves to evangelicals who rejected this form of missionary work as proselytising.⁵⁴ The notion of “proselytising” gained currency in nineteenth-century Europe when Protestant media used the term with decidedly negative connotations to describe Catholic conversion practices—a tendency further reinforced by the Culture Wars. Protestant authors proposed a mission at once more thorough, more effective and more liberal than the one allegedly pursued by the Catholic Church. From their perspective, quality could only be obtained by addressing an individual’s conscience, ensuring that he or she knew and understood the basic tenets of Protestantism and imparting to him or her the message of salvation.⁵⁵

Evangelical critics of medical missions disputed the validity of medicine as a missionary tool, accusing medical missionaries of “luring heathens and Mohammedans to Christianity by means of a dose of castor oil or Epsom salt.”⁵⁶ They reiterated that the initiative to convert had to come from the individual rather than from the missionary. Protestant missionary endeavours were framed as prioritising personal awakening over formal conversion to differentiate them from Catholic missionary activities.⁵⁷ The Basel Mission doctors emphasised time and again that their medical work was subordinate to their role as evangelists, pointing to the fact that a person affected by disease was more responsive to the message of Christ than a healthy person, as Hermann Vortisch expounded in 1905:

A lot of heathens are receptive to evangelisation when they come to see the physician, and that is indeed the wish and the aim of the mission doctor; that not only the body, but also the mind, the heart and the soul of the black man receives medicine and gets cured.⁵⁸

The diagnosis of syphilis unequivocally linked disease to sin and allowed the Basel Mission doctors to emphasise that their medical mission addressed the individual as a whole, including body, mind, soul and heart. Their misinterpretation of yaws as a venereal disease persisted for so long because it served their own interests. The apparent popularity of their syphilis treatment offered a point of entry to address essential tenets of Pietist faith with their African patients. The Basel medical missionaries tried to convince them that syphilis was an indicator of apostasy, providing clear evidence for the deep sinfulness of their heathen beliefs and practices. In line with Pietist notions of healing, they maintained that an effective cure to any medical problem could only come about through conversion, even claiming that this was “the actual purpose of disease.”⁵⁹

3 Bodily Knowledge, Individualism and Spiritual Rebirth

The overarching goal of the Basel Mission, as well as of the medical mission in particular, was individual conversion. The Pietist concept of a spiritual rebirth was imagined as a result of inner conflicts and unrests, an individual’s personal experience with God.⁶⁰ The Basel missionary Ferdinand Ernst, who worked in Cameroon from 1897 to 1909, captured this in a nutshell: “Christianity is not a matter that can be taught or instilled but rather has to be experienced.”⁶¹ This view of conversion as an individual experience, however, was hardly reconcilable with the dominant view in West African societies, where humans’ bodies and metaphysical essence existed through their complex correlations with ancestors, the family unit and the village collective.⁶²

The Basel Mission doctors believed that the teaching of hygiene was an effective method to dissociate potential converts from their communities of origin by increasing personal responsibility for health, strengthening individualism in social matters and providing the mental disposition necessary for a conversion to Christianity. They argued that the promotion of bodily knowledge encouraged practices of self-examination, thereby paving the way for a spiritual rebirth. They assigned accountability for physical and spiritual well-being to the individual person, using their medical work to raise awareness of sin and repentance. The missionary intellectual Gustav Warneck asserted that:

[…] when Christianity has awakened the consciousness of sin, civilising impulses follow regarding clothing, housing and work for example, because then shamelessness, impurity, laziness and greed are recognised as vices that are incompatible with Christian life.⁶³

Based on Warneck’s notion that acknowledgement of sin entailed far-reaching social and cultural transformations, the Basel Mission doctors declared recognition of one’s sinful heart as the most important condition for medical and civilisational progress. They tried to instil in their patients notions of self-awareness and practices of introspection by merging Pietist tenets of purity with concepts of health and cleanliness. Born-again Christians were expected to give outward expression to their spiritual rebirth by renouncing bodily practices deemed incompatible with their new beliefs and adopting a new code of conduct. To the Basel Mission doctors, hygiene reflected one’s dedication to a pious life and indicated proximity to God, serving as the prime marker of difference with respect to the allegedly heathen environment.

Moreover, the Basel Mission doctors valued hygiene as a means to promote “rational scientific views on cause and effect.”⁶⁴ In an article on the significance of the medical mission for German colonies, the missiologist Gottlob Haussleiter commented in 1911: “More necessary than the training of the mind, the heathen needs the purification of his reason.”⁶⁵ The medical missionaries argued that knowledge of hygiene played an essential part in this purification process by encouraging rationality, responsibility and the formation of a logical mind. They viewed Africans as people of the body while defining themselves as people of the mind. This longstanding opposition at the heart of imperial ideology presumed that Africans were less intellectual and more emotional while Europeans were more logical and self-controlled.⁶⁶ Therefore, they sought to access the conceptual world of Africans through bodily practices.

While the Basel Mission addressed their message to the individual, they conceived of a vertical and horizontal circulation of Christian ideas and practices from African teachers and mission-educated children to the larger community.⁶⁷ Hygiene became a main subject in the Basel Mission’s schools from 1892, improving their standing in the eyes of colonial authorities.⁶⁸ The mission schools had been controversial for supposedly encouraging Africans to question the colonial government, especially through their emphasis on literacy.⁶⁹ On the Gold Coast, British administrators took several steps to legally restrict the nature of the education offered to African pupils with their successive education ordinances.⁷⁰ They stipulated that one of the first and foremost duties of education was to teach habits of cleanliness, discipline and hygiene.⁷¹

Patrick Manson, an eminent figure of tropical medicine, gave a speech at Livingstone College in 1908, in which he underlined that mission schools were the most important institutions of tropical medicine, hygiene and sanitation since they had access to “native children.”⁷² Livingstone College in London had been established in 1893 by a conference of doctors sponsored by the Church Missionary Society for the instruction of missionaries in the elements of surgery, basic physiology, tropical diseases and hygiene.⁷³ It remained a unique institution in Europe until 1906, when the German Institute for Medical Mission was established in Tubingen. By then, the institution had already drawn hundreds of missionaries from countries around the world for elementary medical training. It attracted support from influential representative of the Church of England, the medical community and the universities.⁷⁴

The nine-month course at Livingstone College was designed for non-medical missionaries, who were expected “to teach the hygiene required in tropical climates, and to deal scientifically with outbreaks of epidemics.”⁷⁵ In his address on the College’s Commemoration Day in 1908, Manson advised the 299 missionaries who had completed the course so far: “Train up a child in the way he should walk, and when he is grown he will not only benefit personally but he will assist at all events in propagating the doctrines of hygiene, which the European teacher is anxious for him to adopt.”⁷⁶ Scientists and colonial authorities recognised that the most effective way to promote hygienic knowledge overseas was through the training of missionaries since they had familiarised themselves with the climates and inhabitants of the colonies more thoroughly than any other group of Europeans.

Children in particular were considered important allies in disseminating hygienic knowledge, able to diffuse new behavioural norms into their wider communities. In 1903, the Colonial Office in London asked British administrators around the globe to write reports on the progress of the instruction of hygiene to colonial subjects. By 1911, these reports showed that education had shifted dramatically towards hygiene and sanitation.⁷⁷ Helen Tiffin has analysed how hygiene was conveyed in African and Australian textbooks from the late nineteenth century onwards, arguing that the teaching of hygiene featured technologies of literary learning rooted in religious instruction.⁷⁸ According to her, “learning by heart, the taking into the body of the (foreign) text, and the appending of questions to the text, were catechistical devices, which reinforced absorption of the material and its correct interpretation.”⁷⁹

Most texts used in the Basel Mission schools began with an explicit linkage between cleanliness and godliness. The “Catechism of Health,” for example, had pupils recite: “I ought to take care of my body because my body is the house of God and ought to be well kept.”⁸⁰ When the leaders in Basel mapped out hygienic training for African students, they recorded that the teaching of hygiene had to proceed from a solid grounding in Pietist principles of purity. At the same time, they valued the teaching of hygiene as a catechistical device, which had the capacity not only to prevent dirt and disease but also raise awareness for sin and penance. They believed that this type of bodily knowledge promoted social independence, private initiative and the creation of an autonomous self—attributes they considered to be the basis for a spiritual conversion.

Scholars such as Peter van der Veer have argued that “both Catholic and Protestant missions” carried a “new conception of the self […] to the rest of the world.”⁸¹ More specifically, some researchers have claimed that Pietists can be credited with inspiring both evangelicalism and modern individualism.⁸² In recent years, however, there has been growing scepticism among historians about the longstanding assumption that missions acted as agents of individualisation.⁸³ The concept of individualism, with its close associations to ideas of the European Enlightenment and modernity, is certainly not without analytical pitfalls.⁸⁴

The Pietist concept of a spiritual rebirth implied that becoming a born-again Christian was an individual’s personal decision, regardless of race, gender or class. While the Basel Mission in West Africa operated with notions of individual conversion and had some individualising effects, the Committee in Basel was far from advocating self-determination and missionaries on the ground were driven by an unfaltering sense of cultural superiority. Both turned the missionary endeavour into a process characterised by marked asymmetries and conflicts. The communities targeted by the Basel missionaries were not only exposed to the pressures of colonialism but were also caught in an ideological quandary between the message of personal liberation and the reality of European domination. Furthermore, a number of conflicting social dynamics were constantly competing in West African societies, which had their own individualising tendencies that further complicated the missionary dynamic.⁸⁵

The Basel Mission in West Africa displayed a sense of dialectic tension between the individual and the community, which is not abrogated by purely individualistic approaches. The whole purpose of isolating individual converts from their communities of origin was to integrate them into the Basel Mission’s parishes. Community-building activities and the unity of the congregation played an important role since evangelical success meant more than merely growing tallies of converted individuals. True and lasting conversion was thought to be impossible outside of permanent Christian communities. Ultimately, the individual Christian could only be guarded from falling prey to the profane environment by the creation of safe havens. The Basel Mission thus not only engaged in preaching hygiene to individuals but also heavily focussed on creating pure spaces for the protection of their parishioners.